• Häberl, Charles
  • Professor (AMESALL & Religion)
  • Areas of Specialization: Languages of the Middle East, both ancient and modern, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities from the region
  • Office: 15 Seminary Place, Room 6160
  • Phone: 848-445-0275
  • Education: Ph.D., Harvard University
  • Postal Address: Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL), 15 Seminary Place Room 6160, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

About

Dr. Häberl's primary academic focus is upon the languages of the Middle East, both ancient and modern, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities from the region. He has conducted field work with speakers of several different Semitic and Iranian languages. He is a member of the American Oriental Society (AOS), the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL), the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL). He is a frequent attendee and occasional speaker at their annual meetings, and has convened the NACAL annual meeting on three occasions (San Antonio, 2007, Chicago, 2008, and at Rutgers in 2012).He has published research on Aramaic epigraphy, incantation texts, orality and literacy, Middle Eastern folklore, dialects of Neo-Aramaic, and comparative Semitic linguistics in journals such as the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Journal of the American Oriental Society, the Journal of Semitic StudiesEncyclopaedia Iranica, and Numen. His first book, The Neo-Mandaic Dialect of Khorramshahr (Harrassowitz, 2009) is the first account of a previously undocumented dialect of Neo-Mandaic, and the most thorough description of any Neo-Mandaic dialect. His latest publication is a two-volume critical edition, translation, and commentary of the Mandaean Book of John (De Gruyter, 2019), prepared together with Prof. James McGrath.He has a personal interest in the history of constructed languages (or "conlangs"), like Volapük and Esperanto, which has resulted in publications on Bālaybalan, a 16th century conlang based upon the vocabulary of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, with a synthetic grammar, and Unial, an early 20th century conlang based upon the vocabulary of the Romance languages, with an analytic grammar. To know more about Dr. Häberl and his works, please click here.